Albert Jay Nock on war, from Memoirs of a Superfluous Man:
“The outcome of the [1914] war bore hard on those who had swallowed the jobholders’ glib mendacity about the enterprise being a war to end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy. When it finally became clear that the war was no such noble undertaking as all that, but was merely a disreputable scuffle for loot, exactly like the wars which for untold ages had preceded it, those who had accepted it in good faith as a crusade for righteousness felt that they had been outrageously let in, and made no bones of saying what they thought about it.
“I was not one of this number, for I had already cut my eye-teeth on the Spanish War. My observations of foreign affairs since the days of McKinley and John Hay convinced me that what British jobholders were wanting in 1914 was exactly what British jobholders had wanted in 1898. It was clear to me in 1898, as I have already said somewhere in these pages, that the British Foreign Office had constantly before its eyes the vision of a world at peace, dominated and operated by British imperialism, with the United States kept in hand to act as a bouncer and pay heavily for the privilege, whenever malcontents became obstreperous. I could make nothing else of Mr. Hay’s conduct; of the British Colonial Secretary’s ‘blowing the gaff’; and of our military and diplomatic doings in the Pacific.
“The Spanish War had turned out to be a tradesmen’s war; there was no doubt of it. So when the war of 1914 came on, I bent a jaundiced eye upon its officially-advertised aims and motives, for I knew too much of what had been going on in European politics since 1910 to believe a word of them. When the secret treaties came to light after the Bolshevist revolution, and the reports of Belgian diplomatists in Berlin, Paris and London were published, the whole rationale of the war was shown to be just what one would know it must be. When the peace-terms were seen to correspond with the terms of the secret treaties and not with those of the infatuated Mr. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, it could surprise no one. When the League of Nations proved to be only a blind for jobholders intent on maintaining the status quo, what else could one expect?
“I felt somewhat sorry for the gudgeons who had been hooked by the lies of jobholders and their tagtails of the press, pulpit and platform, as one must always feel sorry for the victims of any set of common swindlers; but I did not see how anything could be done about it. I thought the hardest trial they had to bear must be the memory of all the appalling drivel they had poured forth in their spasms of pseudo-patriotic ardour. During the war I often witnessed the sorry spectacle of old acquaintances, normally quite cool-headed persons, emitting great volumes of lurid nonsense about “the mad dog of Europe” and his murderous designs on the world in general; and how if Britain and France should fall, the whole structure of Western civilisation (for so they naïvely called it) would collapse in ruin. What must they have thought of themselves when daylight finally broke in on them!”
